xviii, 245 pages, illustrations ; 23 cm

What counts? In work, as in other areas of life, it is not always clear what standards we are being judged by or how our worth is being determined. This can be disorienting and disconcerting. Because of this, many organizations devote considerable resources to limiting and clarifying the logics used for evaluating worth. But as David Stark argues, firms would often be better off, especially in managing change, if they allowed multiple logics of worth and did not necessarily discourage uncertainty. In fact, in many cases multiple orders of worth are unavoidable, so organizations and firms should learn to harness the benefits of such "heterarchy" rather than seeking to purge it. Stark makes this argument with ethnographic case studies of three companies attempting to cope with rapid change: a machine-tool company in late and postcommunist Hungary, a new-media startup in New York during and after the collapse of the Internet bubble, and a Wall Street investment bank whose trading room was destroyed on 9/11. In each case, the friction of competing criteria of worth promoted an organizational reflexivity that made it easier for the company to change and deal with market uncertainty

Originally published: 2009

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-238) and index

Machine generated contents note: 1. Heterarchy: The Organization of Dissonance -- Searching Questions -- For a Sociology of Worth -- Entrepreneurship at the Overlap -- Heterarchy -- A Metaphor for Organization in the Twenty-first Century -- Worth in Contentious Situations -- 2. Work, Worth, and Justice in a Socialist Factory -- The Partnership as Proof -- Distributive Justice inside the Partnership -- Maneuvering across Economies -- Epilogue -- 3. Creative Friction in a New-Media Start-Up -- An Ecology of Value -- The Firm and the Project Form -- Distributing Intelligence -- Organizing Dissonance -- Discursive Pragmatism and Bountiful Friction -- Epilogue -- 4. The Cognitive Ecology of an Arbitrage Trading Room -- Studying Quantitative Finance -- Arbitrage, or Quantitative Finance in the Search for Qualities -- The Trading Room as a Space for Associations -- The Trading Room as an Ecology -- The Trading Room as a Laboratory -- The Pursuit of New Properties -- Epilogue

Contents note continued: 5. From Field Research to the Field of Research -- From Classification to Search -- From Diversity of Organizations to the Organization of Diversity -- From Unreflective Taken-for-Granteds to Reflexive Cognition -- From Shared Understandings to Coordination through Misunderstanding -- From Single Ethnographies to the Broader Sites of Situations

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